African Union Strives to End Deadly Cycle in Darfur

By SOMINI SENGUPTA

Published: November 29, 2004

The African Union came here this weekend to investigate the kind of incident it had hoped would no longer happen under its watch.

For a week, tensions in this strategic town in North Darfur had boiled over, pitting ethnic Africans and Arabs against each other in mob violence. Then, just after dawn prayers on Nov. 22, rebels attacked the town, killing nearly 30 government police officers and pocking the garrison with bullet holes. The government retaliated with airstrikes. People ran any way they could. Like so many other towns in Darfur, Tawila virtually emptied.

The African Union has struggled to make that familiar trajectory -- a rebel attack, a government airstrike, the flight of civilians, another ghost town -- a thing of the past in Darfur, the vast region of western Sudan ravaged by nearly 22 months of war.

Under heavy pressure, the government has allowed more than 3,000 African Union troops to enter. Although those troops are authorized only to monitor the country's tenuous cease-fire and not to intervene in fighting, their aim is to help prevent further violence just by being here.

But even that goal has proved elusive for a force hamstrung from the start by its small size, lack of expertise and most of all by its strict rules of engagement. The challenge it faces was perfectly illustrated by the mission in Tawila this weekend.

On Sunday morning, a team of nine African Union military observers, trailed by the first journalists to visit this town since the attack last week, stared at the shallow crater that a government bomb had left in this now charred group of huts. One of the huts was no more than a circle of black ash, with an earthen water jug lying on its edge. A woman had lived here with her five children.

The African Union monitors snapped pictures of the bomb site. They interviewed local people who had stayed and many more who had returned because they had heard that the African Union had come.

The monitors, who are unarmed, risked spending Saturday night in the frigid desert on the edge of town -- mainly, they said, to show people that they were there. Lacking tents for all nine men, they slept in vehicles or on cots in the cold open air.

During the day, they handed out their uneaten military rations to women who straggled up the sand streets. By midafternoon on Sunday, they prepared to leave.

As they did, a group of men rushed up and said they feared that the police would harass people who had spoken to the monitors. The leader of the team, Lt. Col. Ahmed Fouad of Egypt, listened and nodded. Later, when asked what he would do about the men's plea, he said he would report it to headquarters. Until there are enough monitors to keep a vigil in Tawila, there is nothing more he could do, he said.

And then the monitors left -- headed back to their base in the state capital, El Fasher, in a long white ribbon of four-wheel-drive vehicles and armored personnel carriers.

For the African Union, a nascent organization representing African governments and struggling to shake off the mantle of its largely ineffectual predecessor, the Organization of African Unity, Darfur represents a crucial test. If the union's mission succeeds in Darfur, it will score a major credibility victory. If it fails, the price will be dear.

''We will take a long time to recover our credibility toward our people and our partners,'' Jean-Baptiste Natama, a senior political officer in the African Union, said this week.

The African Union's success or failure will be measured, in part, by how it responds to incidents like the one in Tawila and whether it can prevent others like it. For now, its troop strength in Sudan, which may take until February or later to reach its full level of 3,400 peacekeepers, is grossly insufficient to deploy full-time to every fractious, violence-prone town like Tawila.

Privately, diplomats in Sudan have long worried that deploying so few troops would be a recipe for failure. Since the violence in Tawila, Jan Pronk, the top United Nations envoy for Sudan, suggested expanding the African Union force to more than twice the number.

Mr. Natama floated the idea of strengthening the African Union's mandate to peace enforcement. ''If the situation is getting worse, we are not going to pack our luggage and leave Darfur,'' he said. ''We are going to have to have a robust mandate to make sure we are not here for nothing. We should be able to bring peace, or impose peace.''

Few people in North Darfur were surprised by the violence in Tawila on Nov. 22. Tensions between the townspeople, largely members of African tribes, and Arabs from nearby villages had been building.

The pivotal event, townspeople said, was a brawl on market day, Nov. 16. A group of Arabs had come to the market, as they normally did. This time, they picked out a pile of women's clothes, stuffed them in their sacks and refused to pay. Instead, they brandished guns.

Frustration was running high from similar incidents in the past, and the town was still recovering from an attack by government forces and allied Arab militias earlier this year. Donkeys and goats had been taken. Homes had been looted. People had sought refuge in the displaced people's camps in El Fasher.

So this time, when the Arabs refused to pay, the Africans retaliated. The entire market took part. People grabbed sticks and stones from the market stalls and began pummeling the Arabs, killing four of them on the spot and injuring as many as seven. By the time the police arrived, the Arab bodies lay bashed and disfigured in the market.

''All of us here participated,'' a man named Ibrahim Ahmed, 32, said, signaling with his chin the dozens of people who had gathered at the market on Sunday to tell the story to the African Union monitors.

''I felt happy,'' Mr. Ahmed confessed. ''What they did to us was more than what we did to them.''

Revenge begot revenge. That night, Arabs returned, firing randomly at the houses and looting from the market. On Nov. 22, the African Union said, the Sudan Liberation Army, a rebel outfit led by ethnic Africans, stormed Tawila as the dawn prayer ended, taking aim at the police station.

Atima Dahab lay in her hut, trying to calm her screaming children as gunfire rattled around her compound and a warplane circled overhead. When the bomb fell on a neighbor's house, her own shook. Dust and smoke darkened the sky.

Hawa Thom watched from a field as the plane approached, a cloud of dust rose, an explosion rang in her ears, and flames flared from the straw roof of a neighbor's house. Five homes nearby were destroyed.

Early that morning, Mrs. Thom said she had dreamed of a camel in front of her house. She read it as an evil sign. She said that in the dream, she told her husband something bad would happen. ''Don't go away,'' she said she told him. She woke up to the sound of gunfire. The bad dream that Darfur had come to signify was unfolding again.

The people of Tawila said they would sleep here on Sunday evening only if the African Union monitors slept here, too. They said the attacks by Arab militias based nearby would stop only if the monitors were in town. They said they did not trust the police and soldiers. ''They must stay,'' Mrs. Thom said, speaking of the monitors. ''Otherwise we can't stay.''

As if on cue, just as the monitors prepared to leave the town market Sunday afternoon, a group of soldiers gathered around the crowd they had been speaking to. ''You don't get smoke without fire,'' whispered a monitor who did not want to be identified. ''The population is afraid.''

Photo: African Union force members investigating violence rode through Tawila in Sudan's Darfur region yesterday. (Photo by Jacob Silberberg for The New York Times)

Map of Sudan highlighting Tawila: Rebels attacked Tawila on Nov. 22, and the government retaliated.